The Free Web Mail Software SquirrelMail was developed by Nathan and Luke Ehresmanis and features a stable, feature-packed and a fairly configurable email server. To use the software you’ll need a Web Server running PHP, and an IMAP Server to connect to.

This Free Web Email Software is written in PHP and includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages render in pure HTML 4.0 (with no JavaScript required) for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements which makes it very easy to configure and install.

The Free Web Email Software has all the functionality you would want from an email client, including the strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation capabilities.The free web mail software has useful functions and a collection of useful plugins up its sleeve. Its even easy to write an extension for it and, provides decent and reasonable customization features that users can take advantage of.
With this Free Web Mail Software you don’t have to run an IMAP server yourself, but you need to be able to connect to one for SquirrelMail to work. Since IMAP is an open standard, all IMAP products should be able to communicate with each other. SquirrelMail requires that the server supports IMAP 4 rev 1, but that’s the only requirement there is.

Some IMAP servers support various extensions, which are developed as a complement to IMAP. Those extensions aren’t required by this free web mail software, but many of them are supported. It’s recommended to have an IMAP server that supports SORT and THREAD if possible.

The SORT extension allows for server side sorting, which is a lot more efficient than having to rely on PHP for sorting. This will improve SquirrelMail’s performance. If the server doesn’t support the THREAD extension, SquirrelMail won’t be able to show mail conversation as threads.

The Free Open Source Web Mail Software doesn’t care about how the server stores the mails, but it’s generally a good idea not to have an IMAP server that store mails in the mailbox (mbox) format. Mailbox performance is low when there are many mails in the same folder and it doesn’t allow both mails and subfolders at the same time in the same folder.

Another good idea is to have an IMAP server that allows the use of virtual accounts. Virtual users don’t have to be system users, which usually is great. Again, this is not a SquirrelMail requirement, but something that you might want to consider when choosing an IMAP server.

You would also want to configure the PHP options. As without the “PHP gettext extension” you will lose considerable performance which you wouldn’t want. The PHP “mbstring extension” is also required for translations that use multibyte or character sets but ISO-8859-1. Without the PHP “mbstring extension” the interface will remain usable, but some internationalization features and fixes won’t be enabled.

It’s a must if you want to read and write Japanese emails, and users who whish to do that must also set their language option to Japanese. The PHP XML extension is also required if the DIGEST-MD5 authentication is used.

The Free Web Mail Software isn’t hard to set up at all and after download of the Free POP3 Web Based Email Software SquirrelMail, users can fully integrate the various options available to suite the purpose of their work. Also Open Source Web Mail Software SquirrelMail is stable enough to use in any production system. With installation over 40 languages, this software is continued to be used in several production systems around the world where it easily handles thousands of users per system.

The Free Web Mail Software is known to scale well for large installations with thousands of users. It’s recommended to have a lot of free memory available at the web server for the system to run flawless. Thus, if your business wants you to use a Web Based Email Software then, this one can suit your needs in much better ways than you thought was ever possible!

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